Museums: a wholesome recreational alternative to procreation and the pub*

The Attic (a name which commemorates our first physical location) is, first and foremost, a site for the research students of the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester: a virtual community which aims to include all students, be they campus-based and full-time, or distance-learning and overseas. But we welcome contributions from students of museum studies - and allied subject areas - from outside the School and from around the world. Here you will find a lot of serious stuff, like exhibition and research seminar reviews, conference alerts and calls for papers, but there's also some 'fluff'; the things that inspire, distract and keep us going. After all, while we may be dead serious academic types, we're human too.

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Words and muses

I am probably fast gaining a reputation for being a humourless pedant when it comes to museum terminology, but I just don't think it's right to use "curating" in the context of micro-blogging or "museum" in the context of archiving social networking activity. Technically, of course, a museum is a shrine to the muses - that is, it showcases and celebrates the products of creative inspiration, and provides fresh inspiration in so doing. This could take the form of a festival site in Ancient Greece, a fashionable periodical in the early nineteenth century, or as now, a collection-based educational institution with a focus on display. But I don't think it's a positive evolution for it to become synonymous with an advertisement for Intel's new processors:

***STOP PRESS***

Museums (em)Power PhD Conference

We have a new PhD conference upcoming this year September 13-14, 2018. It is called Museums (em)Power and will thematically explore power from a contemporary, museum context. The official website and details are forthcoming. Stay tuned to the Attic Blog for the latest!